Wildfires raging on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, for a third day have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in and around the state’s second-most populous city, officials said on Monday.
The cluster of three blazes ranked as the top firefighting priority in the U.S. as a whole, including the drought-parched Pacific Northwest, where dozens of major wildfires have burned for weeks, degrading air quality across a wide region.
The Spokane-area fires have blackened more than 8,000 acres (3,200 hectares) since erupting on Saturday on the northern fringe of the city, home to about 230,000 residents west of the Rocky Mountain foothills near the Idaho border.
Video footage from the fire zone showed a miles-long column of smoke creeping through treetops as airplane tankers swooped overhead, dropping scarlet-colored fire-retardant slurries onto the blaze.
Enormous palls of smoke billowed into the sky north of the city, as flames devoured forest land 6 miles (10 km) from Spokane’s downtown.
‘GO NOW’
Kami Fehlig, 58, was one of hundreds of area residents who fled for their lives before wind-driven flames engulfed their homes over the weekend.
Picking through charred ruins of her house in search of keepsakes, Fehlig paused on Monday to recount how she and her husband watched in disbelief as fire jumped the narrow Spokane River and swept toward their parkside neighborhood in the city’s northwest on Saturday.
“About 30 minutes before it jumped the river, my husband and I were seeing how bad it was, and we told the kids, ‘We don’t want to scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things.'”
The couple and their two daughters, both in their 20s, packed themselves into their cars with the family dog and what few belongings they could carry in their arms – a wedding album, pet supplies, baby books, Fehlig recalled. Moments later, the power went out, and the family sped away to safety.
“It was, ‘Go now, go now,'” she said.
Only later did they learn that their house, as well as the family’s chicken coop, had burned to the ground, along with much of their surrounding community.
“This particular neighborhood has been pretty wiped out,” Fehlig said.
As of Monday, some 64,000 people were under immediate evacuation orders, up from 4,000 a day earlier, according to Benjamin Cossel, a spokesperson for the incident command center.
At least 700 structures have gone up in flames, mostly in residential areas, and aerial infrared surveys showed that possibly another 400 buildings, including homes, had been damaged or destroyed, Cossel said.
The cause of the blazes was under investigation.
BRACING FOR FATALITIES
No injuries or fatalities have been reported so far, Cossel told Reuters, adding, “There’s a high probability that will change in the coming days” as flames subside and search teams are able to reach devastated communities still inaccessible due to extreme fire activity.
An unspecified number of people have been reported missing as flames spread out of wooded areas into neighborhoods and commercially developed areas, “turning from a wildfire to an urban conflagration,” he said.
Roughly 1,100 firefighters were battling the Spokane blazes as of Monday, Cossel said, a fraction of the more than 29,200 personnel assigned to wildfires nationwide, most heavily concentrated in Oregon, Washington state and Idaho, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.
The agency reported more than 100 large new wildfires on Sunday across 15 states, the bulk of them in the Northwest, stretching resources thin across the region.
